Steem blockchain breaks 1,000,000 transactions!

Yesterday, for the first time in history, two blockchain protocols each surpassed 1 million transactions in a 24 hour period. One of those was the Steem blockchain which processed 1,022,251 transactions. The other was Ethereum which also broke the 1 million barrier, but struggled to handle the load, using over 60% of its network capacity. Meanwhile, Steem didn’t even come close to cracking a sweat, using only 1% of its overall capacity.

More reasons why Steem is awesome

Steem is an open source blockchain protocol that any developer can leverage to build social applications that reward users in cryptocurrency

Reward splitting enables developers to immediately generate revenue by redirecting a percentage of the STEEM distributed through their application to themselves

User-chosen account names replace the difficult to remember (and hard to type) wallet addresses used in other blockchain protocols

Built-in escrow payment support enables the exchange of goods and services with a trusted third party intermediary

Learn more

More information about the Steem blockchain and all of its features can be found in the Steem bluepaper.

Taking Steem to the Next Level: Smart Media Tokens (SMTs)

In early 2018, the Steem blockchain will be launching “Smart Media Tokens” (SMTs) which will allow the developers of content platforms and communities to launch their own customized Proof-of-Brain tokens, with real-time zero-fee transfers, on the Steem blockchain. Along with built-in smart contracts that enable fundraising opportunities like ICOs and Founders Tokens, SMTs will allow anyone to instantly tokenize their platform and bootstrap the value of their coin by leveraging all the lessons learned from Steem and steemit.com. More details can be found in the SMT Whitepaper.

Where we are heading

The revolutionary and totally unique proof-of-brain rewards system offered by the Steem blockchain and token are designed to make Steem the ultimate on-ramp into cryptocurrency for mainstream users. The performance and scalability of the blockchain is designed with widespread mass adoption of the currency and platform in mind. When combined with lightning fast processing times and fee-less transactions, Steem is positioned to become one of the leading blockchain technologies used by people around the world.

Thank You

Achieving this milestone never would have been possible without the amazing Steem community, including but not limited to; the witnesses, 3rd party developers, our amazing content creators, and users. Thank you for making this the most heavily utilized blockchain protocol in the world!

But the big difference between the two is security. Eth network is 100x or maybe 1000x secure than steem. It is totally decentralized unlike steem which has a huge amount of premined coins that could be dumped in any moment.

Steem inc and the founders have complete control of the blockchain because they own about 40% of the Steem. They could use it to vote on witnesses who shill for them and do exactly what they want. (Just like facebook.)

They can also crush new investors by dumping huge amount of steem in the market. That is not going to happen with ethereum.

As far as the possibility of Steemit Inc to dictate which top witnesses get elected that is a possibility but so far the stake in the @steemit account (which has about 75% of their total stake) has not been used for that purpose.

For Steemit to dump their stake on the market they would first need to power down. That will take 3 months to accomplish...no one would be taken by surprise.

Block production is not a straw man argument. % of block production controlled by # of entities is the most important measure of centralisation by far as it determines the power to make changes to the blockchain.

And pools definitely can't just split the chain or make hardforks out of the blue like in steem where 20 people have that power.

This isn't true in Steem either. Nodes will reject blockchain forks that roll back anything further than a few blocks. It takes consensus among both economically significant nodes and block producers to fork, just as it does in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Objectively it takes a smaller number of entities to fork or 51% attack the Ethereum network than Steem.

This isn't true in Steem either. Nodes will reject blockchain forks that roll back anything further than a few blocks. It takes consensus among both economically significant nodes and block producers to fork, just as it does in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

People will always use the node that is used by steem inc because they are the ones running steemit. The primary gateway.

I don't see the fact that 5 pools control which version of the software is used as a strawman argument. It is what it is. In the case of steem 1% of the accounts control the witness list...that is also a fact.

As it stands right now I don't see ethereum as being 1000% more decentralized than steem. Sure hypothetically the mining rig operators could switch pools but they don't the same way that other big stakeholders in steem don't vote for witnesses to fork the chain.

As far as Dan or Ned crashing the price I just don't see it happening (It would be more in their interest to sell gradually over time). While we are at it I would not include Dan and Ned in the same conversation (it's no secret that they don't see eye to eye since Dan split from Steemit Inc.)

Etherium is not even started as mineable crypto, it began with crowdsale like ICOs and therefore, ETH corp have tons of cash from the initial sale which is no different from Steemit Inc having large holding.

Both dan and ned have powered down a lot of SP. And they can power down in 7 days a huge amount of SP which if dumped will crush price to 50 cents or less.

Every coin has large holders through initial mining or crowdsale. Not to mention of Satoshi or Satoshi Lite, Charlie Lee of LTC. When people can mine with low difficulty, having 100K BTC or 1M LTC at initial stage does not matter. Moreover, more than the current amount of STEEM will be distributed in next 20 years to the users/miners which is very different distribution and fairer than BTC, LTC and ETH.

@haejin, it is due to one whale @ranchorelaxo voted him with 1.34M SP VP several times. This is not a joke, it is evolving consensus or random act. It is an experiment where it was assumed that good whales will counter evil whales. It is hard to satisfy all the biases of human behavior ( circle jerk + vote selling). But it is better experiment than wasting energy equivalent of a country (e.g. BTC, ETH) through PoW mining. The VP in DPoS is incentivized for curation, however, the rules for VP can always be changed in future HF when consensus will arrive for better.

The main point is that the fear about founders (or any large investor) cashing out their stake is of course always a concern, but it really only matters if they actually dump their stake. Dan and Ned have had plenty of opportunity to dump, but history has shown that they seem to be more interested in taking out small amounts over time in a way that doesn’t crash the price.

They could power down and crush the price, but why would they do so without any reason. Why would some one build a business just to destroy it one day. I have seen many websites and businesses go down, but never seen anyone destroy their own business intentionally.

To add to your point, its advisable to invest in smaller coins with a moderate amount. Steemit coin is only going to grow. As at today one steemit coin on coin market cap is $3.09, now Imagine investing 100 - 500 usd and leaving it for 6 months (that's money we use for things we don't need anyways) . After 6 months or 1 year that steemit coin would have grown to 20 usd worst case scenario. That's some good money. That's being smart.

still the pool have a lot of people behind them so they can join another pool, not like Bitcoin. Is it more decentralized than dPOS based Steem? I don't know but steem would have a hard time recovering from a shutdown of the top witnesses. And voter apathy is worst than what people think.

Overall I don't think any cryptocurrency is as secure as they usually claim. I think the attacks are way cheaper than what they think and if it gets to a confrontation with governments or banks or any real power, we would loose.

...steem would have a hard time recovering from a shutdown of the top witnesses.

Actually that is a non-issue. If a top witness goes down there is a big list of backup witnesses that can fill the void in a short period of time.

A real concern would be if the witnesses have there nodes setup on the same vps providers. In that case the blockchain can be crippled if let's say a government targets the data centers where the servers are housed.

Because the majority of the hashing power of the mining pools for Bitcoin & Ethereum comes from china both coins are not laying on a bed of roses. It would just take a political decision from the Chinese government to shutdown the mining farms (or worse bribe them or coerce them to act for their own selfish interest)

I understand your point. This is why I am a bit reluctant to use privex. I don't know how many witnesses use them.

What I meant was more like say the 40 was down. Are the rest that ready to take over and support this charge? I am not so sure. Also witnessing means having one node doing the job so more chance to be taken down. Actually, as a witness not in the top, it makes sense to attack and try to deactivate the other witnesses.

sure it is 40%? that's already better than I thought. I've seen other people claiming it is up to 93%!
In any case a burn of half of Steemit Inc 's Steem Power would help Steem fly and become more decentralized....other Blockchain companies did it and it helped prices skyrocket. Usually when the devs keep more than 25% of the supply it is frowned upon...

What would happen if a country like China decided to make a crypto currency and got rid of there fiat currency do you think any of the crypto currencies already established could withstand that? Not to mention what if a group of countries made there own crypto currency and replaced paper currency could any crypto currencies withstand that? I would not think so and all the currencies and ways to use them we have now seem like a prelude or experiment in how or what the elite will need to do to strong arm the crypto currency market!

@littleboy ....Yeah... good point.... I'm anxious to see who's going to be using EOS when it hits the market as an open source in June. That will be really interesting... I'm holding my breath... It will have the speed of steem and the security of Etherium. 100,000 T's a second and solid as a rock!

I bought EOS in August, was my very first invesment, thank the Cosmos I HODL all the way even when it touched .50 having bought above 1, is by far the best investment... well second after ADA, so I have security that this project will be huge. Also ADA. I still think Steem will have a fair share of market if it goes mainstream. I am not planning though to buy steem since I think as you guys said before, a whale could drop the price big time.

To add to your point, its advisable to invest in smaller coins with a moderate amount. Steemit coin is only going to grow. As at today one steemit coin on coin market cap is $3.09, now Imagine investing 100 - 500 usd and leaving it for 6 months (that's money we use for things we don't need anyways) . After 6 months or 1 year that steemit coin would have grown to 20 usd worst case scenario. That's some good money. That's being smart.

@demotruk Yet, I believe this is just the beginning! There's plenty of room for exponential growth for Steem! Zero fees, almost instant transactions, already handling more transactions per second than BTC and ETH combined. 2018 will be Steem's year. Steem to the moon!

Hi @demotruk. Steem is really successful cryptocurrency and Now I am Happy to see that is Steem blockchain breaks 1000000 transactions. That's amazing. Nice post about steem. I like to read article about Steem. Thanks for sharing this valuable post.

Yes, this has been winning all kinds of business for Dan's real time block chains. BitShares and Steemit have held the records for months and Ethereum just joined the Million per Day Club for the first time, breaking quite a sweat to do so.

Our pleasure! Development of communities is going well and is absolutely a priority. It is being developed in parallel with SMTs. The team is very large now with multiple teams working on various aspects of the platform.

Out of curiosity, what would it look like for "steem to break a sweat?" When a mining-validated chain is under heavy load, we feel it because transactions take forever to confirm, transaction fees are high, etc.

If Steem were under heavy load, I assume the primary way this would be felt is that people would hit bandwidth limits sooner and lots of small accounts would be entirely excluded from participating in the chain. Would there be other symptoms as well?

There are several different metrics as far as blockchain performance. Just in terms of pure number of transactions, the blockchain software can handle significantly higher volume than what it is processing today (many magnitudes more).

The blockchain does enforce bandwidth requirements on users though to prevent one user from overusing the resources of the system. This limit is controlled by a configurable parameter, which the witness have the option to adjust. Users with more SP (users who are more heavily invested in the network) will have higher bandwidth limits than users with less SP.

There are also memory and server requirements for node operators (such as witnesses, and ‘full node’ operators). As the blockchain holds more and more data (mostly content) these requirements do go up. This is not really a concern for the average users though (the people using the platform) as they don’t really care about the requirements for us to support the network - they just care if they can use it.

Even though the requirements have been increasing, they are nowhere near what is required to keep the Bitcoin (and other similar coins) mining operations going to continue supporting those networks. The Steem blockchain is processing far more transactions than BTC, and doing it much more efficiency than both BTC and ETH.

At current capacity Steem could handle around 290 million tx per day according to Block'tivity stats. This would put Steem behind by a factor of 11 in terms of it's ability to handle facebook-like activity at present 3.2 Billion likes and comments per day.

I imagine that if any blockchain-backed decentralized synchronize database messaging system ever got close to being taxed by carrying Facebook-like activity, we'd see migration to a newer, faster – or at least better backend-supported database solution.

That is, after all, what we're talking about – a distributed database with replication which covers keeping track of all the usual things that a forum/social network has to keep up with as well as token transactions.

Or, more succinctly, "if that ever seems to be a threatening situation, I feel pretty secure that some solution will be found by then, because it's going to be a long time before that's an issue."

We just need the world to know that there is a blockchain that works better than most of the big names. Free, cheap transactions should be what people want. At least the Steem price is rising, but that's without much publicity. I look forward to big things next year.

This is so important, we ALSO just hit $4 Steem price and over $1 BILLION US dollar Marketcap for the Steem Blockchain PLUS around $50 Million about for the SBD marketcap!

Steem is the FASEST blockchain with the MOST transactions and can handle the MOST users and soon we will also have POW account creation and we will be able to handle billions of new accounts/wallets so opening a Steem Wallet on a smartphone will be as easy as opening a bitcoin wallet so we can totally start pushing steem/SBD as alternative to slow Bitcoin! in fact SBD can be seen as having LOWER supply and thus MROE rare and MORE valuable than BTC but with ALL the advantages of steem like high Speed and super scalability but ZERO transaction fee versus Bitcoins $10 transaction fee to wait hours even a DAY or two!

This is awesome!!!! It's amazing what this blockchain can do compared to the rest of the world out there. This place is a hidden gem that won't be hidden much longer. Just glad to be a part of it!!! Steem On!!!!

This is great news! I am excited and thankful to be a part of the Steemit community and part of the blockchain here. I have been reading a lot of material on how Steemit's blockchain is more efficient than the bigger names as someone mentioned and I have to agree, especially when considering how many unconfirmed transactions are over on the other sites. I have faith in this platform and hope to hear about more progress as time goes on!

Congratulations on your first reply. If you reply to this reply, it will be your first reply to a reply to your first reply, although you should rather reply to andrarchy's reply because then it will be your first reply to the first reply to your first reply:)

Wow! More and more signs that blockchain technology (and cryptos) are getting big.

The other week, I was amused by the fact that the "crypto kitties" practically brought Ethereum to its knees... while the same load would have taken about 1% of our capacity, here. In thinking that through a bit further, it also points to how only Steem/Steemit has (currently) the potential to truly be "the people's blockchain." Pretty much any other system would struggle under the load of "popular adoption." That's another WOW, right there.

Steem has a lot of things right and I remain hopeful, but prevalence of kickback rings in operation harvesting the reward pool with spam suggests that the 'revolutionary and totally unique proof-of-brain rewards system' could use some attention.

I guess it works to prove the absence of brains also. There's so much money being thrown at Steem now, without much apparent effort to direct it to real growth and away from those who just want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

I hope that Steemit Inc. distributes a good chunk of its Steem and does a massive amount of marketing when we leave beta. Steem Super Bowl ads, sponsorship of World Cup events, a hundred meter tall LCD display in downtown Shanghai. Think big.

We are better than the most available cryptos but we are not listed in the most trading markets beside that some markets decided to stop the deposits/withdrowals of Steem/sbd maybe this is a mechanism made by the steem-dev to control the price of sbd but this is not the best option why !? People/traders will just buy steem/sbd to move their funds from market to another one in no time 3s and no fees to benefit from the difference of prices between the markets then the price of both steem/sbd will reach the moon in no time .
so can we see in the future a post that explain the reason behind this and ask for the users to vote for steem/sbd to be listed in this markets and thank you .